Group 2 Post 3

Samantha and Zhuoya did research into some of the primary and secondary sources available through the different libraries on campus. These are their findings:

After searching for Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films. Angel City Press using the Berkeley library, I found that the author of this book is Arthur Dong, who is also a director, producer, and screenwriter. This book can be found in Doe library and Ethnic Studies library. It included 304 pages and was published by Angel City Press in LA. It mainly introduces and analyzes the representation of Asian Americans in Hollywood films with some illustrations to help the readers better understand the content. It first analyzes some earliest movies shot in America's Chinatowns and then explores the Chinese representation and misrepresentation - in Hollywood's Golden Era. It then informs the readers about some remarkable, contemporary Chinese and Chinese American actors, directors, and screenwriters and their specific achievements. When doing this research, I confronted some challenges. For instance, there were some other resources having the same title, including some articles and videos, which were confusing. I found this resource by looking at the publication years, the authors, and the resource types, which enabled me to find this book. Some primary and secondary sources that could be accessed include a video titled Hollywood Chinese: the Chinese in American Feature Films, produced by Arthur Don, and an article with the same title, written by Christian Klein. I also found some review articles of this book and film. I noticed that many of these resources still revolve around the book by Dong. Some questions I have are what are some other books or films that also explore the representation of Chinese in Hollywood's Golden Era. -Zhuoya

I looked closely at the ten flyers advertising the Great Star Theater digitized by the East Asian Library as part of the catalog of San Francisco Chinatown Flyers collected by Stephen Horowitz. In looking at the content of the films, I found they are largely martial arts or kung fu films set in China, and most are not set in contemporary times but rather representing a different past era. Most of the text on the flyers is a film synopsis with a fair amount of detail on the characters and much of the plot written in both English and Chinese. They were all films that were released and produced in Hong Kong in 1979 or 1980 by the Shaw Brothers production company. One thing I noticed about many of the films is that they would have the English Hong Kong title rather than matching the titles the film’s were given for American distribution. For example, the film The Convict Killer was known as Iron Chain Assassin in the United States, but this original English title was used on the advertisement. 

It’s easy to research when the films were released in Hong Kong, but there’s no data on when they were played in the theater or how different the screening and release dates might have been from each other. The flyers have no dates or screening times on them for the specific films, but the Great Star Theater information included that it was “Open daily at 12:00 pm” which was also written in Chinese. The lack of information about specific screening availability raises lots of questions about the role of the theater as a social or cultural space and how that might be contrasted to the goals of Hollywood theaters. These flyers are from at least the early 80s, well past the change in conventional film viewing culture following Psycho in the 60s where audiences started walking in at the beginning of films instead of at any time. Did this walk-in time rigidity apply to the Great Star Theater and it's just not listed on the flyer, or is this indicative that the role of the theater in a diasporic community might serve a different purpose than Hollywood? If the theater was more of a social gathering place or a way to connect to Chinese culture, the specific plot continuity of the films might not have mattered as much so long as the theater was always open to those who wanted it. This would align with the detailed synopsis on the flyers which give away a lot of the plot beats of the films, much more than Hollywood theaters would want to reveal before a showing. We are hoping to connect to members of the current community in Chinatown who would have visited the theater in the past and would be able to share some of their personal experiences on this matter.

A curious note about the flyers is that all but the last one has a promotional image of the film being screened, but many times these were not the same theatrical posters released for the films. The only research I was able to do was an extremely thorough Google search, but despite the room for error, I have a lot of faith in this conclusion. I couldn’t always tell where the content for the images came from (perhaps stills of the film), but sometimes I could identify elements from official posters that were manipulated into this new image. The first two images below show the small differences between the Shaolin Abbot image on the Great Star Theater flyer and the theatrical poster. The text has been emphasized on the flyer and the group of people on the middle right had side of the poster has been moved to the left side with a film strip(?) taking its place on the right.

(Left: IMDB; Right: San Francisco Chinatown Flyers Collected by Stephen Horowitz.)

Below is the comparison between the Murder Plot images, where there have been more dramatic edits made, moving the characters above the text from where they were below it originally. Interestingly, the two main characters were also switched to face the opposite direction.

(Left: IMDB; Right: San Francisco Chinatown Flyers Collected by Stephen Horowitz.)

I’m not sure who made the changes or where or how they were done, but I find them so interesting. Emphasizing English text makes some sense, and I can see some changes being made to simplify the image for smaller black and white printing, but some just seem minor aesthetic changes without a clear motivation. -Samantha